NYC Apartment Prices Hit Record Highs, Slowdown on the Horizon
While most of the nation deals with a housing slowdown and slump, Manhattan is seeing its highest prices ever.
The average price of a Manhattan apartment in the first three months of 2008 was $1.7 million. This number is up 33.5% from the same period in 2007, according to brokerage firm Prudential Douglas Elliman.
These record prices, however, don’t provide the entire story of Manhattan real estate. While prices are rising, sales are actually slowing, and brokerage firms in Manhattan say they see some trouble on the horizon for the housing market.
According to research done by the New York times, the large price increase reflects the sale of an unusually high number of expensive apartments, which has skewed the average. In the first quarter of 2008, 71 apartments sold for more than $10 million, compared with 17 apartments in that range for all of last year.
A number of brokerage firms released data about the first quarter that generally followed the same trends. All the data showed that the median price of an apartment rose.
The median price for studios rose by 22%, to $490,000 from $401,000; and the median price for one-bedroom apartments rose by 12%, to $750,000 from $669,000, according real estate brokerage firm the Corcoran Group.
However, current inventory is rising, and after a flurry of not-so-good news in the financial sector, fewer buyers are signing contracts. “We’re starting to see a hesitancy in the marketplace,” Diane M. Ramirez, president of Halstead tells the New York Times. “What I look at very carefully is the signed contracts, the deals that are coming to us right now. I’m starting to see a slowdown.”
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